Covenant, Christ and Assurance
Exodus 24
Today we’re arriving at our final message in our series in Exodus, at least for now—we’re going to take an extended break before continuing on from chapter 25. If you remember, God brought the people of Israel to Mount Sinai to make a covenant with them. He told them the terms of the covenant—that if they would obey his commands, they would be his precious possession among the nations, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
Then they came to the foot of the mountain, and the glory of God came down on the mountaintop, with thunder and lightning and fire and smoke.
Moses receives the first set of laws that God gives him (which Eduardo and Joe preached on the last two weeks—I have to say, I don’t envy the task they had). Then Moses comes back down from the mountaintop, and that’s where we pick them up today.
In Exodus 24, what we essentially see is the ratification of the covenant God is making with his people. It’s the final step in the process, like the official stamp on a birth certificate.
And the steps of this ratification are unbelievably dense with meaning.
The Blood (v. 1-8)
When I was a kid I remember being struck by something I’d heard a thousand times before but never thought of. We often sang a song that we still sing today:
What can wash away my sin? / Nothing but the blood of Jesus
What can make me whole again? / Nothing but the blood of Jesus
Oh, precious is the flow / That makes me white as snow
No other fount I know / Nothing but the blood of Jesus
I was about eight years old when it really hit me for the first time. I remember singing that song and church and thinking, Hold on—that’s disgusting!
There’s a lot of blood in the Bible, and the first thing we see in this chapter, that we haven’t seen before in the context of this particular covenant, is the shedding of blood.
Moses comes down from the mountain and writes down everything God told him while he was there (the Book of the Covenant, which is the Ten Commandments and the various other laws we saw last week). Remember, Joe spoke about how these laws were a prototype for heaven on earth—a place in which God is central, where the vulnerable are protected, and where human life is valued.
At this point, the terms of the covenant are clear: God tells the people, if you do these things, then you will be my people, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Now it’s time to make it official.
But the way they do that is a bit surprising.
Exodus 24:3–8 (ESV)
Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the rules. And all the people answered with one voice and said, “All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.” And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. He rose early in the morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel. And he sent young men of the people of Israel, who offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to the Lord. And Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he threw against the altar. Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it in the hearing of the people. And they said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.” And Moses took the blood and threw it on the people and said, “Behold the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.”
Think of what this must have been like. First Moses builds an altar, with twelve pillars, one for each tribe of Israel. That would have taken a good while. Then they offer a bunch of sacrifices—they slaughter a lot of oxen. Moses drains the animals of their blood—and it would have been a lot of blood—and throws half of the blood against the altar.
Then he reads the people the Book of the Covenant—chapters 20 through 23. He reads it out loud, so that everyone can hear. And all the people verbally commit to obeying these laws, like the bride and groom making their vows at a wedding ceremony before the mayor declares them husband and wife.
And then—here’s the fun part—Moses takes the other half of the blood (and again, it’s a lot of blood), and he throws it on the people. (Can you imagine me doing that on a Sunday morning?)
And after throwing the blood on the people, he makes a formal declaration: “Behold the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.”
Why all the blood? It can seem like we’re obsessed with blood in church; we’re always talking about blood, we sing about it, we see it in the Bible all over the place. Why did the covenant have to be ratified by blood?
There are a couple of reasons, and the first is purely visual, I think: Moses throws the blood on the altar, and then throws the blood on the people.
Romuald, Liz and I recently went to a conference in Latvia with Acts 29, the church-planting network we’re members of. When we arrived we saw a big banner with the Acts 29 logo printed in huge letters; at the same time, they gave us wristbands with the same logo printed on it. They were the most annoying things, because once you tightened them around your wrist, you couldn’t loosen them; you had to cut them off. Those wristbands were there to identify us: we belong to this network; we were attending this conference—and we know it because we see the same logo on our wrists as we see on the conference banners.
That’s what’s happening here. The altar, representing God, and the people, are both sprinkled with the same blood. It’s a way to see that these two are united to one another.
But that’s not the only thing, or even the main thing. The main reason for all this blood was that the people were a sinful people, and God is a holy God. In order for God to be united with them, blood had to be shed.
Look quickly at Genesis 2.15-17:
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
So that’s the basic info we need to remember: the consequence of disobeying God is death.
At the time, death that wasn’t natural—especially death that was punitive—almost always included the shedding of blood. Blood has always been the most potent picture of death we have.
To say this another way, because the people are sinners, and God is holy, it shouldn’t be possible for them to be united to God. The only way for that to be possible would be for them to suffer the consequence of their sin—to die—because that’s the only way God can consider the sin eradicated.
So God provides another way: he lets animals take the place of the people. The animals’ blood is shed in the place of the people—and in that way, God considers their sin covered and cleansed, and he can enter into covenant with them.
We’ve seen something like this once before in the Bible, but it was a little different. In Genesis 15, we see God tell Abraham to get several different animals, cut them in half and lay them down with the two halves facing each other, making a kind of bloody path. And God is the one who comes down this path; God is the one who passes through the blood, in order to make a covenant with Abraham.
The covenant that God makes with Israel here isn’t totally different from the covenant he made with Abraham, but it’s not exactly the same either. Rather, we can say that the second is the continuation of the first. It’s what we call progressive revelation: the fact that God doesn’t reveal everything about himself all at once. He does it in stages.
In the covenant with Abraham, God takes the initiative to pass through the blood; in the covenant with Israel, the people are brought in to that passage—the blood is thrown on the altar and on the people. Through this sprinkling of blood, the people participate in what God is doing; they’re showing that this sacrifice was given for them, and they are now united to God.
The fact that God has human beings participate in the shedding of blood for the forgiveness of sin is important. When we see this is what he’s doing, it starts to make sense that when God made good on his promise to Abraham, on his promise to Israel, he did it by coming to earth himself, as a human man. A man who was both fully human and divine. A man who bridges the gap between the altar and the people, because he’s both.
Jesus, the God who passed through the bloody path, becomes the sacrifice who takes the punishment for his people, in their place; he sheds his blood on the cross in our place.
This is why what Jesus said at the Last Supper is so shocking and extraordinary.
Look back at v. 8. When Moses sprinkles the blood of these animals on the people (and every time afterwards that the practice is repeated), he says, “This is the blood of the covenant that God has made with you.”
When Jesus holds up the cup at the Last Supper, he personalizes it: he says in Matthew 26.28, “This is MY blood of the covenant, which is poured out for the forgiveness of sins.” Every disciple sharing this meal with Jesus would have recognized his use of that quote, and the way he changed the “the” to “my”.
Jesus is saying he is the fulfillment of the sacrifices made in Exodus 24; he is both the God who took the burden of blood on himself, and the sacrifice who provides the blood to purify his people.
The Vision and the Meal (v. 9-11)
After the covenant is ratified by the sacrifice of the animals, and Moses’s sprinkling the blood on the altars and the people, there is one final step in the process. The last step in the ratification of ancient covenants was almost always a meal. We see this elsewhere in the Bible, and there are still modern forms of it today: what do we do after a wedding celebration? We eat with the bride and the groom.
Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel. There was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness. And he did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel; they beheld God, and ate and drank.
Can you imagine being at that meal on the mountain? Only Moses, Aaron, Aaron’s sons, and the seventy elders of the people were allowed to attend, and they got to see something they shouldn’t have been able to see: they were allowed to contemplate a vision of God himself. Not all of God, but only his feet. In the vision, God’s feet are resting on some sort of precious stone, indicating his royalty. We see in v. 11 an important precision: that God did not lay his hand on them. It’s important because they shouldn’t have been able to come that far up the mountain; they shouldn’t have been able to see God.
But this was the covenant ratification meal; the leaders of the people needed to be present.
There are several interpretations about what exactly is happening here; whether this was just a mass vision they all had (since God at this point is a spirit and doesn’t literally have feet), or if it’s what’s called a “Christophany” (an Old Testament appearance of God the Son). Or maybe it’s something totally different, for which “feet” would be the closest possible way to describe it.
There’s one interpretation I like, though, and it has to do with the Last Supper we mentioned earlier. (This was put on my radar by a pastor named J.T. English; it’s not totally conclusive, but it is very interesting.)
God finishes ratifying his covenant with the people of Israel through a meal. And Jesus does the same thing with his disciples, but it’s reversed: in Exodus, God is present at a meal with his people after the shedding of blood; in the gospels, Jesus is present with his people before the shedding of blood (his own). It’s a covenant ratification meal in anticipation of a coming sacrifice.
This meal is described in all three synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke. In those gospels, we see Christ give them the bread and saying, “This is my body”, and the cup, saying, “This is my blood.”
This is not, however, described in the gospel of John. In John 13, we see something else—we see Jesus, getting on his hands and knees, and washing his disciples’ feet. Later on in the evening, Jesus would say, “This is my blood of the covenant,” and an astute disciple would have remembered Exodus 24.
The parallels are easy to notice. In Exodus 24, we have the meal; we have the blood of the covenant; and we have the feet of God.
That’s what we see at the Last Supper too—except it’s reversed. We have the meal, but the blood of the covenant is Christ’s blood, which would be shed just a few hours later. And we have feet—except it’s not God’s feet the disciples are beholding, but the disciples’ feet that God is washing.
We no longer have to go up the mountain to see God; now God has come down to us.
The Ascent (v. 12-18)
Now that the covenant is ratified, the real work begins. Moses receives instructions to come up on the mountain to receive the stone tablets with the Book of the Covenant that God himself has written down for the people’s instruction, so they wouldn’t forget. So he puts Aaron and Hur in charge, and brings his assistant Joshua with him.
Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord dwelt on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain. And Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights.
We see here a reminder of the incredible sight we see in chapter 19—it hasn’t changed. God’s glory rests on the mountain like a cloud of fire, and Moses goes into the cloud to be in the presence of God and receive further instructions (which we see in the following chapters), instructions Moses will communicate to the people of Israel, so that they can know how to live as God’s people. He’s there for forty days and forty nights.
Once again, let’s go back to the Last Supper, and what came after.
The new covenant is ratified by a meal with his disciples. It is sealed with the blood of the covenant—Christ’s blood, poured out on the cross for the sins of his people. And after his resurrection, what does Christ do? He ascends into heaven, where he now sits at the right hand of the Father.
What is Christ doing in heaven right now?
He is interceding with the Father for us, and he is communicating God’s Word to his people through the Holy Spirit, so that we might know how to live as God’s people.
Step by step, God is showing us in Exodus 24, in a partial way, what he will fully accomplish through Christ later on.
The Assurance of the Covenant
Now all of this might seem interesting, but sort of theoretical, and pretty removed from our day-to-day experience.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The central message of this text is very simple: God is infinitely great, and he is faithful to the covenant he made with his people. That’s easy to see from this passage.
What’s not so easy to see is what difference it makes.
In a word, the difference is assurance. And nothing could be more current, or more necessary, than that.
For a huge number of people in this church, in the rest of our country, and across the Western world in particular, one of the biggest struggles we face in our Christian lives is the struggle with doubt. And while people struggle with doubt in lots of different areas, there is one particular thing that characterizes a Christian’s doubt, almost every time.
Most Christians don’t necessarily doubt that God exists—at least not to the point where they stop wanting to follow Christ. No, the more common thing is for a Christian to doubt that God is truthful.
We doubt that God is telling the truth when he tells us that certain things are right, other things are wrong, that sin is sinful and that holiness is desirable.
We doubt that he is telling the truth when he says that everything he did in Christ actually applies to me. I don’t doubt it for the person sitting next to me—but I read a text like Psalm 103, which says that the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and I think there should be a footnote at the bottom of the page that says, “Except for you.”
That is why this text is so important. In my opinion, Exodus 24 is one of several passages in the Old Testament that are absolutely key for the assurance we have in him.
The first thing we see here is that God’s covenant with his people is a concrete, legal matter. It has steps; it has things the people must do, and things that God commits to doing. It is a binding arrangement between both of them.
Under our legal system today, if the courts judge someone innocent of a crime, that person can not be tried again for the same crime. The judgment of innocence, at least in regards to that offense, is binding. It is absolute. And that’s how it is in human courts, which are far from perfect.
God’s judgments, God’s commitments, are infinitely more trustworthy than our own. If God makes a covenant with his people, he will keep it. He has kept it. He kept the first covenant with his people in Christ, who fulfilled the law for them; and when he established the new covenant with his people, he ratified it with his own blood. This is what we remind ourselves of every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper together: we remind ourselves that if Christ has established a covenant with us, ratified in his own blood, he will never back out of it.
Think back to all the parallels we saw between Exodus 24 and the gospels. The reason why we spent so much time looking at them is because those parallels show us that God told the truth. He told the truth in his words, and he told the truth in history—he laid out his entire plan of salvation right here. The people didn’t understand it at the time, but after his resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples. And (we see in Luke 24.27):
And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
This would have been the point at which the disciples looked at Exodus 24 (and several other passages) in one hand, and the Last Supper and Christ’s crucifixion in the other hand. And they would have seen that everything that had happened during Christ’s ministry, trial, death and resurrection was exactly what God had planned from the very beginning.
There is simply no better foundation I know of for the assurance we have. God did what he planned to do. He did what he promised he would do. He stayed faithful to his word; he stayed faithful to his covenant.
I will fail, but he will never fail. I will be unfaithful, but he will never be unfaithful.
Our assurance is iron-clad.
The second thing we see here is much simpler, but it’s really easy for us to forget: God is a lot bigger than us.
Think about how doubt works. You never doubt the things you can see, objectively. You never doubt that you’re sitting in a chair, or that I’m actually talking to you now. Or even things less concrete: you don’t doubt that you’re thinking about what I’m saying. If you don’t know whether or not you agree with me, you don’t doubt that you don’t know. If you’re feeling hot or cold or anxious or happy, you don’t doubt that you’re feeling those things, because they’re within your range of experience. They’re things you can see.
This might sound a little simplistic, but this chapter is pushing us in that direction. God is so much bigger than us. Infinitely bigger. When he comes down, he covers the entire mountain in a cloud like a devouring fire. When the elders of Israel look up to see God, all they can see is his feet.
And these things—the fire, the cloud, the feet—are just little glimpses. God is infinite—he is omnipresent, he is omniscient. He sees everything, and he knows everything. We see the tiny things around us and in us, and even that, we don’t even see very clearly; he sees everything, and he sees it perfectly.
Isn’t it normal, then, that God might sometimes say things we don’t understand? Isn’t it normal that he might command things we don’t like, because we don’t understand why they would be good things? Isn’t it normal that God can grasp things we can’t?
Let’s be hyper-practical for just a minute. This is what we often have a hard time seeing: doubt has more to do with accepting than with understanding.
Unless you’re a doctor, when you go in for a complicated medical procedure, you won’t understand everything aspect of what the doctor’s going to do to you. You don’t understand all the complexities of the procedure, and you don’t need to, because the doctor knows. So you accept it, not because you understand it, but because the doctor knows more than you do.
And this is how it always works—even for very unscientific things like relationships.
I don’t understand why my wife married me. I look back at who I was back then—even the part of me I was projecting, the part I was letting her see—and I don’t get it. What was she thinking? I sincerely don’t understand why she chose to do that. And I definitely don’t understand why she still loves me today, twenty-one years later.
Now if I don’t understand why she loves me, there are two directions I can take. (And every couple, at one time or another, will have to make this choice.)
On the one hand, I can doubt her love. Since I don’t understand what’s going on in her mind, I can choose not to take her word for it when she tells me she loves me—or even when she shows me she loves me. I can decide not to accept that, because I don’t get it. And I can constantly worry that she’s going to leave me, because no way she would want to stay with me, given how unlovable I am.
But there’s another option: I can make the decision to accept what she says, and trust her. I still don’t understand why she loves me, but I recognize that she’s able to see things that I’m not, that she thinks differently than I do. So I accept that somewhere in that part of her I cannot see is something that explains her love for me. I accept to trust her—that she loves me, and that she’ll be with me until one of us dies.
I understand why people have doubts; I’ve got them too. But at a certain point we’ve got to make a decision. It’s a hard decision, but every one of us, at some point, will have to make the decision even when we don’t feel it.
We have to decide to accept what God says about himself, and what he says about us, even if we don’t understand it. We have to decide to trust him, to take him at his word—even if we don’t understand how or why that word is good.
He has given us every reason to trust him. He is infinitely greater than us; he sees infinitely further. And he is always, perpetually, faithful to the commitments he makes. That is what we see here, and that is the basis for all of our assurance.
So next time you doubt, I’d encourage you to come back to Exodus 24. Contemplate this massive God who appeared on the mountain. Contemplate the cloud; contemplate the fire; contemplate the vision. See how God ratifies the covenant with his people, and remember the words of Christ, much later on: This is my blood of the covenant, which is shed for you.
See your God, and accept what he says. You won’t fully understand him, but you can trust him.
